Quick and Easy XenServer to Hyper-V Conversion

Lately I’ve been standing up more and more Hyper-V hosts – I’d estimate my environment is 80% virtual at this point with a total of 20 servers.

I had one remaining XenServer with about 4 VMs running on it. I wanted an easy way to move these VMs to Hyper-V. I tried using the XenCenter GUI to export to a workable format but that kept failing – unfortunately I don’t have any screenshots since this was done a while ago so the exact errors escape me.

This was tested on XenServer 5.6

My process was:

Decide where to export the converted virtual machines to. I opted for an SMB share on a NAS, but you can easily adjust to save to a USB drive or to local storage, if you’d like.

Open the XVA in XenConvert and follow the prompts to convert it into an OVF.

Once the OVF is saved, browse to the folder. The VHD should be inside.

Create the machine in Hyper-V with the VHD attached. Remember to install Hyper-V guest additions and to check network settings.

That should be it! This was the easiest way I found to convert virtual machines from XenServer to Hyper-V VHDs.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 30th, 2013 at 9:46 am and is filed under Hyper-V, XenServer.
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